


Mississippi Mud Pie

by kamja



Category: Arashi (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Friendship, Gen, M/M, Romance, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-04
Updated: 2013-06-04
Packaged: 2017-12-13 23:37:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/830157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kamja/pseuds/kamja
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jun remembers his college days as Ohno prepares to get married.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mississippi Mud Pie

He never played _Final Fantasy 6_ , but he knew “Kids Run Through the City Corner”. When the piano swelled up, the notes running over him like water, Jun only needed to close his eyes, and he’s back in his college dorm room. The door is open, and Nino’s door across the hall is open too. Further down, people are chatting and laughing and the little tings from someone’s instant messenger punctuate the noise. It’s a Friday night, it’s the end of midterms, it doesn’t matter. Everyone is always happy. And Nino’s door is open, and he’s playing on his electric keyboard with his headphones disconnected, so the music floats across the way. Jun doesn’t look up from his magazine, sticky from the soda Aiba spilled on it during dinner in the dining hall. Ohno dozes on the top bunk, his DS still resting on his chest. He shifts, and his blanket falls to the floor with a soft thump.

Jun knew "Kids Run through the City Corner". Every note ran in his veins.

 

“I’m getting married,” Ohno said one day, many years later. Jun looked up from his coffee and smiled. There was a pang in his heart, and he knew it was because marriage meant growing up, and if someone in the group was getting married, that meant they were all growing up.

“I want you to be my groomsman,” Ohno continued. He stirred his drink with a spoon, holding back a grin while trying to talk seriously. “Nino and Sho and Aiba too.”

Jun agreed, because that’s what friends were for.

 

It was the middle of winter, and Ohno slid quietly out of the top bunk. The bed creaked just a little, and Jun, unused to sharing a room, cracked open one eye. Ohno got up at ungodly hours. He signed up for 9 o’clock classes. Jun knew that Aiba would already be waiting downstairs, eating sausages and pancakes. They would sit together and drink orange juice, and Aiba’s morning tension would rub off on a sleepy but willing Ohno until both of them were laughing in the crisp morning air. Jun knew this because at the beginning of the semester, he couldn't fall back asleep after waking up, so he joined them in the dining hall while shooting daggers out of his eyes.

“Nothing good ever comes from waking up early with Aiba,” Nino once said darkly about his roommate. If it were up to him, he’d have all night classes.

Jun watched Ohno lazily as the latter returned from the restroom and pulled a sweatshirt over his stomach. Winterlong, the well-fed Ohno and Aiba were becoming chubby like bears. Ohno quietly gathered his stuff, even diving into his laundry hamper for a textbook. No one ever knew how they got there, Jun mused. But they were always in there. Ohno pulled the door closed with a soft click and Jun buried his head under the covers, hiding his nose from the sharp coldness that rushed in from the hallway. 

They never argued as roommates, except that one time when Jun was so sure that Steven Spielberg directed all three _Jurassic Park_ movies, but no, Ohno was right. He only produced the last one. Jun was pretty pissed because he lost, even if it was such a little thing, and Ohno just shrugged and kept browsing the Internet as if nothing had happened. In reality, nothing really did happen, but Jun was at that age when everything was still kind of a big deal.

He was angry for about a day, but that sort of one-sided anger was hard to sustain. Ohno was too oblivious for that kind of thing, too focused on his art classes to notice a lot of things. Even in the following years, when they moved to different dorms or off campus and had different roommates, they never fought. They simply _were_ , which Jun liked to think was pretty straightforward.

 

Nino still lived close by, and so he and Jun ended up helping Ohno with a lot of the wedding things. Ohno and his fiance decided to save money by not hiring a wedding planner, but that meant the work was to be evenly divided between them. Nino and Jun perused the paper samples at the printing store while Ohno discussed the font and format of the invitations with the store consultant.

“Blue was always a good color for him,” Nino pointed to a bright medium blue envelope. He worked in IT now, though by all accounts it sounded like he was hardly working and mostly writing his debut into indie music.

“This one is cool,” Jun spotted an ivory invitation with a deep blue border.

“Seems a little serious though...did she want lilac as a secondary color? That would make it more cheerful.”

 

Ohno used to keep his keys on a blue lanyard. He hung it off the back of his chair, the same as Jun. One day after Thanksgiving break, Jun came back to find Ohno sitting outside the room with his duffle bag.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, unlocking the door.

“I got on the plane,” Ohno began morosely, standing up and following Jun into their room. “And then I realized my keys were still on the kitchen counter.”

Jun wanted to laugh, he really did. “So they’re 900 miles away right now.”

“Yeah,” Ohno sighed. It was a pretty miserable sigh. “My mom’s mailing them to me.”

 

“Remember that time when Ohno became a nomad for a week?” Jun asked Nino, still eyeing the stationery. “He had to pack up all his stuff for the entire day, because he couldn’t get back into the room until we met up?”

“Do I remember...” Nino rolled his eyes, but he was smiling. “He practically camped out in my room. We played tons of _Mario Kart_ , though. And he told me all your secrets.”

“I’m sure he did,” Jun never told anyone his secrets. But there was that thing Nino did sometimes, when it seemed like he could read everything that was written on someone’s face, and somehow Jun felt nervous.

“I got a sample,” Ohno came up behind them and held out a formatted invitation. “What’d you think?”

Nino peered at it. “It says the wedding starts at 2 AM.”

“What?”

 

Some time after the keys arrived in the mail, Sho appeared for the first time. He knocked politely on Ohno and Jun’s door frame.

“Hi,” he said, poking his head inside. “Does Aiba live here?”

“No, across the hall,” Jun replied, not paying much attention.

There was pause, and Sho didn’t move. “Does Ohno live here?”

Jun looked up. Who was this person looking for, anyway? “Yeah.”

“Oh, ok. I just recognized that drawing, that’s all,” Sho pointed at a pencil drawing Ohno had taped to the wall above his desk. He retreated to knock on Aiba and Nino’s door.

Sho and Aiba were in the same math class, and as it turned out, Sho was also in Ohno’s Sociology class but Ohno didn’t know that.

“I sit a couple of rows behind you,” Sho explained when they went down to dinner. He and Aiba spent a long time going over a problem set. There was an eager demeanor about him, though he tried to hide it. “You were making that drawing in class.”

“Oh,” Ohno replied. He looked torn between feeling creeped out and proud.

“Hey, my roommates are having a party on Friday,” Sho said quickly, sensing the change in atmosphere. He took a sip of soda. “Why don’t you guys come?”

Sho lived off campus in a two-flat with two other guys. The downstairs was theirs; the upstairs was rented by a married couple who often traveled. The party was already over; his roommates had followed the sorority girls to another party in the quads. The apartment seemed blissfully quiet, albeit alcohol-smelling and a little sticky. Sho leaned back on the sofa and finished off his drink. 

“She was pretty, huh.”

Ohno nodded in agreement. “8 and a half out of 10.”

“Nah, 7,” Nino replied. He poked around the table for some leftover popcorn.

“Maybe I’ll ask her out,” Ohno looked thoughtful.

“Do it, be a man,” Aiba said drowsily from the other couch. He was laying on it with a pair of bongo drums on his stomach. He thumped on them with one hand for emphasis. The hollow sound grated against Jun’s ears.

“Hey, don’t break those,” Sho warned, his expression suddenly clear through the alcohol fog. Those drums didn’t belong to him.

“Do y’think she has a boyfriend?” Ohno continued, clearly perplexed by the situation. He slowly peeled the damp label off his bottle of beer.

Aiba shrugged and sang a song softly to himself, drumming on the bongos with his fingertips.

Jun, who could feel himself slowly sobering up, decided to dispense with some friendly advice. A part of him warned him against saying it, though. “Just be straightforward, and there won’t be any misunderstandings.”

“Aiba, your phone,” Nino said from the table. Aiba’s cell was there, vibrating. He looked over at his roommate and saw that he was fast asleep.

“He can crash here and go home in the morning,” Sho offered, getting up. He looked at the cups and bottles and trash strewn about the apartment, and decided to ignore them.

Nino didn’t say anything, but pulled a marker out of his pocket as he walked over to Aiba’s couch. He drew a bunch of freckles on Aiba’s cheeks. Sho watched him, snickering.

“Are you sure there won’t be hell to pay when he wakes up?”

 

“How’d you pop the question?” Jun asked one afternoon when they were done with stuffing envelopes. He never wanted to see another wedding bells postage stamp again.

There was a silence, which Jun easily sensed as embarrassment, but it dissipated as quickly as it came.

“I just looked her in the eyes and asked,” Ohno gave him a sidelong glance that was at once boyish and knowing. “There can’t be any misunderstandings that way.”

Jun nodded and laughed a little, though there was a feeling he couldn’t shake.

 

“Catch,” Ohno said one day, entering the dorm room with a pair of soda cans. He tossed one to Jun, who barely caught it. The coldness of the can felt great in his hand. The air conditioning system was broken, and Aiba even snuck into the science building to sleep in one of the classrooms because it was so hot. Funny, how the school would pay to cool an empty school building overnight but not for an extra maintenance man to fix the dorms.

They drank the soda in silence, savoring the cold feeling of the liquid going through their chests and into their stomachs. The windows were wide open, hoping to catch even the slightest breeze. The rush of cars from the road below mingled with the birds. Jun watched as a line of sweat beaded on Ohno’s forehead and streaked its way down his smooth face, his muscular neck, disappearing into the collar of his shirt. It was the first heat wave of late spring, just a few weeks before the end of the term, and Ohno already had a tan. He smelled slightly of plaster from his final project, and the weather seemed to intensify it. 

Across the hall, Nino cursed the heat and started playing “Kids Run Through the City Corner”. The kids were running angrily, overturning the fruit stalls and tripping old ladies. It suddenly melted into a more solemn “Clair de Lune”, for reasons only Nino knew. Once Jun heard the game version of the song, and it sounded strange to him. Nino played it the only way Nino could.

Ohno bit his lip, and it was unclear if he was annoyed or amused. He stretched his arms, his slim hand still grasping the can, his t-shirt sticking to his back and revealing his shoulder blades. His bear fat was mostly gone, but some of it clung to the edges in a pleasant way. Ohno’s nose was much too sharp at the beginning of the year. Jun sighed, and turned back to his homework.

Later that day, all of them went down to the lake to cool down. Aiba and Ohno brought beers in a backpack and they half-buried their drinks in the sand to hide them in the twilight. Jun sat next to Ohno, and they talked about anything but school, their shoulders bumping together. They got to a lull in the conversation and Ohno stood up, staggering slightly.

He pointed to the water. “Y'know, I bet I can swim waaaaay out there. It’d be a piece of cake.”

And before anyone could say anything, he jogged into the lake. Jun swore that he heard a distant, “I’ll show you all!” before Ohno dove into the water. He went out about twenty feet before his path curved into a circle. Still no one said anything, as he turned the circle once, twice.

“Fool,” Sho said drowsily, taking another swig of his beer. He had a surly look about him, but they all knew that he was three seconds away from a laughing fit. Nino subtly began to bury Sho’s legs in the sand, who didn’t notice what was happening. 

“Ohno! Where're you going?” Aiba shouted out after a while.

Ohno poked his head out of the water and pushed his hair out of his eyes. He was still just thirty feet from shore. He spun around, confused. “What? What?”

“Where are you?” Jun chimed in, laughing.

“Mississippi mud pie!” Ohno exclaimed for the sole reason that it felt right. He flapped his arms and slapped the water noisily.

Sho laughed so hard that he fell backwards onto the sand.

When they got back to the dorm, it was well into the night. Ohno’s shirt had already dried to damp, though all of them still tracked sand into the lobby. The RA watching the door ignored it, giving them a cursory glance before turning back to his text messages. The building felt cooler; the maintenance man must’ve fixed things. 

Jun fumbled with the key to their door, and Ohno wasn’t much help. He slouched against the wall and teased Aiba while Nino opened their door. Their laughs rose up and echoed down the hall. Aiba and Nino disappeared into their room, and Ohno hooked his arm around Jun’s as they entered theirs.

“Jun...Jun, I wanna say something,” Ohno said as Jun closed the door behind them.

"What?” Jun asked, turning around to face his roommate.

Ohno’s mouth was on him, hot and wet and still tasting of beer. Jun’s mind scrabbled to make sense of what was happening, yet at the same time he closed his eyes and didn’t dare open them again, letting the feeling wash over him like a song. Ohno’s damp heat buzzed around him, and Jun could feel the wetness seep into his own shirt. Their hands bumped together and Jun flinched away, unsure of what to do. _He's drunk,_ Jun thought. _But..._

Then the top bunk creaked, and when Jun opened his eyes, he was standing alone by the door. Ohno was already dozing off on top of his blankets. There wasn’t any sound but the blood rushing in Jun’s ears.

 

“What about this one, sir?” the assistant at the tuxedo shop held up another vest.

Ohno frowned at his reflection in the mirror. “Looks good too...”

He threw a helpless look at Jun, who was observing off to the side. Jun stepped forward and suggested a different style. The assistant selected something else. Ohno ducked into the fitting room with the clothes over one arm, and when he came out in a properly fitted tuxedo and the correctly chosen vest, that pang in his heart came back, and it finally hit Jun.

The boy he once loved was getting married.

 

“What will I be when I grow up...” Ohno clicked through the course registration website impatiently. “Jun, what’re you taking next year?”

“Probably more poly sci,” Jun replied, putting away his laundry. “Though I heard Intro to Christianity's an easy A.”

“Let’s take something together,” Ohno said, clearly bored with this task. “We can take turns going to class.”

“Sure,” Jun turned to hang his shirts. Ohno seemed to have no memory of what passed that night after the beach, though he certainly woke up with a cold from sleeping in a wet shirt.

Jun knew it was better that way.

 

The days leading up to the wedding dwindled quickly. Both Aiba and Sho flew in at the same time, and it wasn’t long before Ohno’s bachelor party was just a memory, more fuzzy to some than others. The wedding day dawned bright and clear, despite the weather forecast. Jun adjusted his tie solemnly in front of the mirror. Sho, who was staying at his apartment, talked on the phone as he ironed his shirt.

“Yeah, the Foster account should be wrapping up by the end of the quarter...Look, just email the docs and I’ll review them sometime tomorrow.”

He hung up on his secretary, and shook out his shirt. “Hey Jun, who has the rings, anyway?”

“They’re right here, actually,” Jun held up a small box with two wedding bands inside. They were elegantly made in yellow and white gold.

Sho whistled low. “Nice. I heard that Ohno’s boss got them made?”

“Yeah, he was able to get a discount on them.” Ohno designed t-shirts at a fashion label. “Nino said we need to be there by noon, so you better hurry up.”

As Sho turned away to finish dressing, Jun took one last look at the rings before closing the box and slipping them into his pocket.

 

Aiba was flipping through the newspaper comics while Jun filled out a crossword on the next page. It was move-out day, and there were boxes everywhere. The two of them had stopped packing for the moment, lounging around in the hallway between their rooms. The dorm was mostly silent. Several rooms were already empty. Nino was long gone; he caught a flight back home after his last final. There was a lonely feeling everywhere, though the parking lot outside was completely clogged with moving vans and cars.

The two of them didn’t say anything as they relaxed for a little bit. There was no hurry; Sho’s roommates were both studying abroad next year, so Jun and Aiba had been slowly moving their stuff into the two-flat over the past couple of weeks. Only a few boxes remained, so they decided to at least wait until people stopped using the elevators.

Ohno came back up the stairs to the room, panting slightly as if he’d been running. Jun moved out of the doorway slightly to let him pass.

“That’s all for me,” Ohno grunted, slinging a bag over one shoulder and picking up a box. “Have a good summer, guys.”

Aiba and Ohno shared a fist bump. “Don’t forget, we’ll be throwing Jun’s birthday party the first week of school.”

“Sure thing.”

“Bye, Ohno,” Jun looked up from his crossword. He hoped that wasn't too awkward.

“Bye!”

Aiba noisily flipped a page in the following silence.

“Jun,” Aiba had definitely picked up some of Nino’s observation skills over the past year.

“I know.”

A sigh, and Aiba changed positions.

“I’m gonna miss the food here.”

 

Nino and Jun got assigned balloon duty with the bridesmaids, while Aiba and Sho went to work arranging the name cards in the reception area. The bridesmaids chatted nonstop, but they did the work quickly. The maid of honor flitted from place to place like a panicked bird, continuously distracted. Her clicking heels echoed on the smoothly polished floors. It wasn’t long before Nino’s attention started to wander.

“There’s a piano here,” Nino said, looking around the room. He trailed his fingers along the keys as he sat down. Jun didn’t look up from where he was tying a balloon onto the back of a chair. The _Pink Panther_ theme sprang up and loped across the ballroom. The bridesmaids went up in a peal of laughter. Jun smiled. He missed hearing Nino play.

When the girls headed out to give directions to the caterer, the tune suddenly changed. Jun turned around, and Nino was playing with his eyes closed. Jun went back to his task and both of them smiled at the same time, unseen by the other. Nino really could play it the only way he could. It was all there, every memory, every laugh, every early morning breakfast in the dining hall.

They knew every note of “Kids Run Through the City Corner” by heart.


End file.
